Years ago, the fellows at the Berkman Center decided that we needed a single day a week where we would all make a best-faith effort to be at the center, so we could socialize, talk about our research, share ideas and generally do whatever it is that fellows are supposed to do. By tradition, this day is Tuesday, when many of the fellows attend the Berkman lunch series, and a large number of us show up for “fellow’s hour” - an informal 90 minute roundtable.

Sometimes these roundtables are quite serious and involved, especially when a colleage is presenting new research. Sometimes… not so much.

Yesterday afternoon, I talked a bit about my fascination with Chinese pushback on western media coverage of protests in Tibet - anti-cnn.com and videos on YouTube promoting the view that Tibet is an integral part of China. I’ve argued on this blog that these are a form of bridgeblogging, and made the case that these are a form of amateur “public diplomacy” at a conference at the Fletcher School yesterday.

While my colleagues seemed somewhat interested in those arguments, what captured everyone’s attention was the phenomenon of YouTube video at fellows’ hour. David Weinberger somehow made a segue to Senator Mike Gravel’s exceedingly odd campaign video where he covers “Helter Skelter”.

(I recommend skipping the first thirty seconds and beginning once Gravel takes the stage. Gravel has released a number of interesting videos, including a cover of “Power to the People“, and two “avant-garde” pieces - a seven-minute film of a campfire called “Fire” and downright disturbing piece where Gravel stares into the camera for seventy seconds before dropping a rock into a lake and walking away. The latter two videos are the products of a pair of video professors in USC - Gravel explains that they approached the candidate and offered to make the videos for free.)

The floodgates opened, and we spent the next hour trolling the net for presidential song videos. There’s a wealth of them out there, ranging from the inspiring to the truly bizarre, ranging far beyond will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” (and the wonderful parody john.he.is) and Obama Girl (and the Obama Girl/Giuliani Girl “debate“.)

Jake Shapiro, one of my fellow fellows and the head of PRX, a project that’s helping change how independent producers access US public radio, has been collecting citizen video for the BallotVox project, a site that is covering citizen media responses to the elections. (Think of it as a domestic version of our Voices With Votes project.) He’s got a great set of videos indexed at del.icio.us, collecting people talking and singing about their candidates of choice.

It’s quite hard to find pro-Hillary and pro-McCain music videos that haven’t been produced by the campaigns themselves. Those you can find tend to be somewhat cringe-inducing. An amateur remix of the Rocky theme song to promote Hillary is reasonably painless, but it’s been watched only 4,000 times.

Watched far more often is Gene Wang’s “Hillary4U&Me“, embedded above. It’s a musical bridge back to the 20th century, arriving somewhere in the early eighties, shorly before “We Are the World”. Comments were disabled on YouTube, but it’s safe to say that’s not because they were overwhelmingly positive - the site retains a one-star review for the video. (I strongly recommend viewing the video above, then viewing one of several available videos depicting an unwary viewer watching Wang’s song.)

The song is so bad that there was a widespread blogosphere discussion about whether it had been produced by the Obama camp to critique his primary rival. Nope - it’s the brainchild of a Hillary supporter and tech entrepreneur, who admits that his may not be the most successful product in promoting his candidate: “I do agree that some of the Obama videos are better. But we have the better candidate by far.”

The pro-McCain videos, at least, were intended to be funny. Humor site 23/6 has released “It’s Raining McCain” and “Here Comes McCain Again“. It’s unclear the connection between the Arizona senator and eighties songs with rain metaphors, but there’s no debating the fact that it’s very difficult to get the image of McCain, falling like rain, out of your head.

That’s not to say that all pro-Obama videos are pain-free. It’s not especially easy to make it through magicalchaswick’s “Hey There Obama“, a moody folk song sung by a boy soprano. (I’d pay to hear him sing a duet with 12 year old Brook Pernice, who may be looking for a new candidate after her man, Mike Huckabee, withdrew despite her impassioned country-western outline of his positions and traits.)

But it’s possible that Obama’s got the greatest range of musical styles represented, from roadhouse country through reggaeton to reggae and calypso.

Some of these are clearly professionally produced - Amigos de Obama’s Tejano and Reggaeton songs have some pretty high production values, and Viva Obama (above) isn’t exactly the sort of thing you produce in your living room some afternoon. But some of the most amazing may well be, like this Bollywood masterpiece, below:

Roughly a year ago, my friend Bruno Giussani offered a prediction for the 2008 elections. In response to the pro-Obama remix of Apple’s 1984 ad, he argued, “2008 will be the campaign of user-generated swiftboating. It will be a campaign dominated by information chaos.”

I think he’s right about the chaos, and off on the swiftboating. Not that there isn’t a great deal of nasty political disinformation on YouTube. There is. But the viral nature of the medium seems to favor the spread of some videos over others. If it’s funny and/or has a good beat, it’s got a much better chance of going viral.

I did an informal timeline of Reverend Jeremiah Wright videos on YouTube, both before and after ABC broke a news story about the “God Damn America” sermons - there were videos of Wright circulating previously, but with very, very few views. After the story broke, hundreds of videos were uploaded featuring the Wright clips. It wasn’t a YouTube story until it became a mainstream media story, at which point political actors in both camps took to YouTube to play through their attacks and responses.

My significantly less serious prediction for 2008 - the winning candidate will be the one who convinces Moldovan band O-Zone to re-record “Dragostea Din Tei” as a campaign song.

“Hallo, Barack?”

I’d very much welcone any other links to music videos produced by any of the US presidential candidates… or for that matter, candidates anywhere else in the world. My comment thread is your comment thread…

A special bonus - while flooding you with videos, allow me to recommend a wonderful radio segment from South Africa parodying election rigging in Zimbabwe. Many thanks to Abdulrahman for forwarding it.

Since I don’t make any money from my blog, I generally don’t pay attention to my traffic statistics.

Things would be a little different if I were attempting to make a living - or even beer money - from my blogging. At Tripod, we were obsessed with our traffic from very early on. I remember analysing logfiles from our first days online, in late April 2005, and guessing at who was looking at the site based on their IP addresses. (When we had only about 50 viewers a day, and there are only a few hundred thousand web users, this was kinda a fun game to play. Ooh! That must be Dick logging on from his office!)

Analyzing web logs helped us figure out that we were in the wrong business. Our homemade tools ignored all our user-generated content and only ranked how different pieces of professional, commissioned content were doing. When we modified the tool to count all the traffic to the free homepages we were hosting, we discovered that our edited traffic represented less tha 10% of our total traffic. Had we not figured out we were in the homepage business, not the edited content business, we’d likely have gone out of business before selling the company.

Then again, religious tracking of our logs helped us detect porn and pirated software, and build efficient tools to eliminate them from the site. In retrospect, our obsession with removing content that violated our terms of service is probably what kept us significantly smaller than Geocities… and is also what kept us from selling our company for hundreds of millions of dollars, instead of for the merely obscene fortune we sold the business for. The logfiles giveth, and they taketh away.

I was looking at logfiles today for the best possible reason - as fodder for an argument with one of my closest friends. Nate had forwarded me an article by Tom Engelhardt about US airstrikes on suspected terrorists in Somalia. Nate argued that the article was a good way to get readers to understand the obscenity of US policy in Somalia - a proxy war, supported by anonymous airstrikes with a strong potential to kill innocents, possible only in a country where we either don’t believe there will be consequences for our violation of soverignity, or don’t care. I thought the piece was pretty good, but was old news - the US government has been increasingly fond of air power, and the complication that we often don’t know whether our strikes hit their targets is well documented, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And besides, I argued, no one gives a damn about Somalia.

To try to make this last point, I looked at statistics from Google Analytics collected from my blog for the past year and expected to be able to show Nate that none of my most popular stories were about Somalia.

That turns out not to be true. The 17th most popular post this past year is an old post, titled “Mapping Somalia“. I’m a bit baffled as to its popularity - it comes up as the 3rd hit for “mapping Somalia” on Google, but comes up much lower for “Somalia map”, which I would expect is a more popular search query. And it doesn’t show up in the list of 100 queries that send most of the traffic to my site. (According to Google, the largest plurality of people visiting my site come in via search engines - 42% of the total. This probably isn’t true - Google Analytics undercounts traffic via RSS.) Another Somalia post - on an American of Somali descent being held prisoner in Ethiopia - also made the top ten. That’s far better than I’d expected.

I’d expected my blog stats to reflect the web at its worst - attention paid to those rare posts where I talk about tech industry stuff or silly, viral stuff. And there’s some of that - my very silly post about Nate and my attempt to build an outdoor hot tub is the sixth-most popular post, in part because Mark Fraudenfelder kindly featured it on BoingBoing. And my defense of Robert Scoble’s honor makes the top 100… though just barely.

Instead, what becomes really clear is the value of answering people’s questions. The most popular post for the past year is a chatty, technical post about Berkman’s stop badware efforts and the situation a friend had with a “this site may harm your computer” message from Google. It’s become quite popular with folks trying to figure out why Google thinks they’re malware. Other posts that might apply directly to people’s lives are popular as well - some thoughts on Facebook and privacy; posts on attempts by LiveJournal to remove fanfiction blogs, and the fanfic community’s responses; a post about treatments for diabetic retinopathy.

But it’s not just technical questions. Between writing about obscure African topics and lesser-known speakers at conferences, I’ve been unintentionally pimping myself to Google, which has done its level best to bring me new readers. Search Google for Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony and the sixth match is one of my rants, titled “Just How Crazy is Joseph Kony?”. This worries me a bit, as I’m far from expert on Kony, and it’s hard to understand the situation in northern Uganda without understanding this strange figure.

At least 30% of my most popular posts are the direct result of liveblogging TED, Pop!Tech and other conferences. That’s a useful reminder for me the next time I’m three days into TED and ready to walk away from the keyboard. There are thousands of people who end up at my blog not because they had any interest in Africa or international development, but because they heard that Jill Bolte-Taylor’s talk at TED was amazing and read my notes on her presentation. (She’s the #5 search leading to my site over the past year.)

Ultimately, what’s affirming about this exercise is that some of the more provocative, Africa-centric stuff I’ve written continues to get a healthy amount of traffic, sometimes years after its original publication. “Africa’s a continent, not a crisis” is now almost three years old and still gets a healthy amount of traffic. And my long post on Cute Cat Theory not only is the third most popular post on the site, but Google tells me that the average reader spent seven minutes on the page, which implies that they actually read some of the content before drowning in my verbiage. And I’m totally thrilled that several of my posts from TED Africa, including ones documenting debates in the African blogosphere, make it into the top hundred.

Of course, not everyone gets what they’re looking for. The #3 search that led people to my site this past year as “Sheila Kennedy”. I’m guessing very few of those people were looking for information on Harvard design professor Sheila Kennedy, who presented an interesting (if controversial) solution for lighting in the developing world at Pop!Tech. No, my guess is that they were interested in the Sheila Kennedy who appeared on Big Brother, who’d previously been a Penthouse model. (You’re on your own for finding those links.) Similarly, I suspect that the reason this story about attending a Turkish bath is so popular is that it includes the phrase “naked Turkish men” - the 24th most popular search query that leads to my site. Again, my apologies for anyone disappointed in what they find here.

The lessons I take from this? Be obscure. Write about stories that other people don’t write about. Write about brilliant people who aren’t well known to the web. And if you’re having problems getting people to pay attention to your stories on Somalia, it never hurts to put in the names of obscure starlets who’ve taken their clothes off for photo shoots.

After loading ninety pages of I Can Has Cheezburger, you may find yourself out of lolcats. Not to worry. Ian McKeller is here to help you.

The LOL feeds page will take an arbitrary RSS feed and apply the headlines to a set of cat photos, taken from the Cute Cats series on flickr. The original application was designed to create better Twitter error pages (which feature cute cats, but are static, which gets frustrating when Twitter goes down half a dozen times in a week.)
What this means is that you can read news headlines from CNN, each one augmenting a cute cat image. Or feed in your own news source and see how your blog looks plastered on cat images.

Actual lolcat from the Global Voices lolcat feed. No cats or Kazakhs were harmed in the making of this image.

I found out about this when reading the notes from a recent meeting of the Global Voices lingua community, the amazing folks who translate content into a dozen other languages so that we’re able to share citizen media with people all over the world. Evidently, the LOLCats version of Global Voices is an action item coming out of a two hour meeting. I don’t know if this is a proposal to localize McKeller’s tool, so we can produce LOLCats in Bangla (one of the tasks I suggested in my Cute Cat Theory talk) or whether it’s simply a proposal that we change the format of Global Voices to all LOLCat.

I could live with that.

Like a lot of my progressive bretheren here in the US, I’ve got a crush on my neighbor to the north. At times, it’s a full-blown case of Canada envy. A growing economy, progressive social policy, functional health care, a positive international reputation… it’s enough to make a liberal look longingly at that 49th parallel.

My wife and I have been indulging our Canadophilia via media, especially the strange, quirky, funny television shows like Slings and Arrows and Trailer Park Boys. Throw in a little televised curling, and I’m set for the seven months of winter, thank you very much.

So you can imagine how pleased I was to discover that Air Canada’s beautiful new Embraer 190s have seatback video systems that include a wide selection of Canadian and Franco-Canadian films for your viewing pleasure. Flying home from Toronto last night, I sampled Shaolin Delivery Boy, a charming short about a Sino-Canadian actor who can only find work by assuming a fake Chinese accent and learning the martial arts, before digging into Weirdsville as a main course.

It’s this second film that made me realize I wasn’t on a US carrier. The first ten minutes feature a dead rat in a toilet bowl, heroin use, loan sharking, prostitution and ice-skating down a street in bare feet. As we were landing in Boston, the film’s protaganists were being beaten with a curling stone and broom. Needless to say, this film is now on top of my Netflix queue. And I’m trying to imagine just how much of the film would remain uncensored if it were to be shown on American television, never mind in the main cabin of an American airliner. Perhaps the closing credits.

Oh Canada, that frigid, yet funky land. You have ever so much to teach us.

I spent my birthday making bacon. There are far worse ways to turn 35.

When I say “making bacon”, I’m not talking about the part where you fry it up in a pan - that happens tomorrow. No, I’ve been engaged in the week-long process to turn pork bellies into bacon, a project that’s involved three of my favorite passtimes: research, carpentry and cooking.

The research part is easy. Ever since Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s brilliant “Charcuterie” was published, food hackers have passing around recipes for making your own bacon - I received roughly ten emails after a blogger posted his results with the Ruhlman/Polcyn recipe, and have been meaning to try it myself ever since.

Making bacon’s pretty simple - take some pork belly. Rub it with salt and sugar. (I used maple syrup, “pink salt” - which contains nitrates, useful for killing mold and bacteria, and kosher salt, which, if you think of it, is a bit ironic.) Put it in a plastic bag and let it cure for about five days, turning it each day. Wash off the cure, and let it sit in a cool place overnight to form the “pellicle”, a sticky layer that absorbs smoke. Then smoke it.

It’s this last step that invites you to get creative. You can use a traditional barbecue grill, build a low fire and put the meat as far as possible from the heat. That will serve as a hot smoker and will usually maintain an internal temperature of 200-250F, allowing you to cook the meat using smoke. I wanted to try something slightly different and build a “cold smoker”, a device designed to keep the meet relatively cool (sub-125F) and simply infuse it with smoke. The real reason for the cold smoker is to be able to smoke items like mozarella cheese, which will melt under high heat… but I decided to use the smoker to make very smoky bacon, finishing it in the oven at 200F to make sure it’s properly cooked.

There are good recipes out there for building smokers from trash cans - I ignored them and decided to try something a bit more dramatic. I had an old barbecue grill kicking around, and with help from my friend Bob, chopped off a few pieces and riveted on a few others to create a fairly airtight metal box, with a pair of bottom vents and one large top vent to let the smoke escape.

While Bob smoothed out the rough edges of the firebox, I cobbled together a smoke chamber from a couple of pieces of lumber, some baker’s racks, a pair of hinges and some hook-and-eyes. We mounted the wooden box on the side of the smoker, fashioned a smoke tube from lightweight aluminum, cut a hole in the back of the wooden box and connected the two. To maintain the fire, you open the smoke chamber, retract the tube into it, then open the firebox - an ugly hack, but one that required minimal engineering. Another janky hack is the bucket of rocks, pictured below, which counterbalances the weight of the firebox. This particular hack led to a discussion of a name for our workshop - “Bucket of Rocks Labs”, which may beat out “New Janky Workshop” as a future brand name for these projects.

We call our creation “The Baconator”.

We fired up the smoker at our New Years’ party to smoke some ribs, an early “test piece” of bacon, some fresh mozzarella and about three meters of homemade venison sausage. It worked so much better than anticipated that it’s hard to even describe. The resulting products were delicious, and the apparatus required a minimum of maintenance - it took a long time to get a fire going in the first place, as there’s little air coming into the firebox, but once it caught, it needed tending only once every three hours or so. After smoking today’s batch of bacon, I plan to disassemble and reinforce the smoke box - the difference in humidity between the inside and outside of the smoke chamber is quite severe as ambient humidity in the winter here is about 0%, and hence, the front door of the smoker is already buckling.

As I spend the day smoking bacon and using the last of the raw milk we bought to make a cheddar, I’m realizing how much of the time I spend with friends over New Year’s is spent executing complex projects. Historically, these have been building projects - a trebuchet, a massage table, several iterations of gers, an absurdly unsuccessful hot tub. Lately, they seem to focus on food. Because, hey, just how many failed hot tubs does one man need anyway?

Last year’s focus was on cheese - we turned 25 gallons of organic milk into lovely mozzarella, ricotta, a remarkably good parmesean, and possibly the best cheddar I’ve ever eaten. It’s time consuming, but not difficult, and the results are literally astounding - on our first try, we made cheese that rivalled the stuff I can buy at local gourmet shops. This year, Nathan brought the equipment necessary to create dark chocolate from fermented cacao beans - a powerful juicer to extract the chocolate liquor from the beans, and a melangeur, which mixes the liquor with sugar. On his first try, he and friends produced chocolate better than anything I’ve ever tasted before.

Whether or not making bacon, cheese, chocolate or sausage is something you’d want to base a party around is up to you, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s pretty central to how my group of friends gets together. Almost all of us have highly cerebral day jobs and rarely get to pull out the power tools. And while we all enjoy talking to each other about serious things - what you’re working on, thinking about, aspiring towards - it’s wonderful to have a collective joint project to allow you to spend time together without deep conversation. Working together creates a bond, a form of social capital that helps keep us together from year to year.

In other words, we make bacon together because we’re friends… and we’re friends because we make bacon together.

There’s a longer, deeper post about the power of the collective joint project, looking at how projects like Global Voices manage to bring people together across national, cultural and linguistic lines. And while it’s worth thinking about, it’s going to have to wait for another time. I’ve got bacon to fry.

Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where I’ve lived since 1989, is farm country. The next town over from Lanesboro is Cheshire, MA, whose town center includes the Cheese Press Monument. The cast concrete cheese press is a reminder of the efforts of the dairy farmers of Cheshire in 1801, who donated a day’s milk production to make a giant cheese as an inaugural gift for President Thomas Jefferson. The milk from “nine hundred or more ‘Republican’ cows” produced a 1,200 pound cheese that had to be delivered to the White House via sledge because it was too large to be loaded into any available carts - as a result, it was delivered on New Year’s Day, 1802, after sufficient snowfall made cheese transport possible.

The Berkshires are actually more famous for raising sheep than for dairy cattle. In Hayward’s New England Gazetteer of 1839, the author noted, “This county is rough and hilly in many parts, but it affords considerable very fine land, and produces much wool, all sorts of grain, and exports great quantities of beef, pork, butter, &c. The number of sheep in this county in 1837 was 136,962.” At that point, the county’s population was about 40,000, implying a 3.5:1 sheep to person ratio, which approaches the contemporary Australian ratio.

Organic rocks, recently harvested in Lanesboro, MA

Note that most of the commodities mentioned in the Gazetteer are animal, not vegetable products. You don’t need to plow to raise dairy or sheep, and this is a critical factor in making agricultural decisions in the Berkshires. It’s very difficult to cultivate any crops in our soil without a healthy harvest of our most plentiful agricultural resource: the rock.

I spent much of this weekend harvesting a fresh harvest of organic rocks, pictured above. My original intent was to clear and turn over about a quarter acre of land so I can plant apple trees. I rented a Barreto 918, a machine referred to by the company that rented it to me as “the beast”, a 9HP, 210 kilogram monster designed to turn over soil 30 cm deep. It’s a very disconcerting feeling to have almost five hundred pounds of hot metal leaping out of your hands every time it encounters a substantial rock.

Midway through the process, I realized that I was clearly trying to farm the wrong crop. With a market for organic vegetables, organic milk, organic meat, it’s clear that the only obstacle to my roadside stall selling organic rocks is widespread misunderstanding of proper rock preparation and usage. As recently pointed out on my Flickr page by “plussed”: “Pan fried in some olive oil with garlic and a bit of white wine they can be great….”

Plussed is, of course, a New England native, experienced with rock preparation, cultivation and enjoyment. But I realize that many possible customers are less experienced in cooking with rocks. With that in mind, I offer an old family recipe for Pasta con la Pietre:

1 pound smooth rocks, preferably organic
6 cloves garlic
1 yellow onion, minced
1/2 cup virgin olive oil
1 bunch italian parsley
2 cups white wine
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 pound pasta

Carefully wash rocks, removing dirt and small rocks. Place in the bottom of 8 quart stockpot, fill halfway with water. Bring to a boil, hold at rolling boil for five minutes. Drain rocks and transfer to sautee pan. Add oil, garlic and onion to rocks and sautee over medium heat until onions are lightly browned. Add white wine and red pepper flakes, scraping the bottom of the pan to incorporate burned garlic and onion into the liquid. Simmer over medium heat to reduce liquid, until rocks are lightly glazed.

Boil pasta in salt water until al dente. Drain, and toss with chopped parsely and contents of the sautee pan. Remove rocks and serve. Serves four.

Three years ago, I got fascinated by the phenomenon of Fiji Water. I couldn’t believe that it made economic sense to ship heavy bottles of water from a Pacific island to slake my thirst in Massachusetts. Learning more about Fiji water led me to learn more about container shipping, and to spend a great deal of time thinking about the comparative mobility of bits, atoms and people, a major thread in my work the past few years. While I still find the idea of shipping water from Fiji to the US to be environmentally reprehensible, I am grateful for the provocative idea of Fiji water.

Evidently there are other writers out there who’ve found the bottled water phenomenon provocative. Writing in Fast Company, Charles Fishman has a long feature on the economics and ethics of bottled water. While Fiji is a particular target, he’s curious about the ethical issues in general of purchasing a product that has environmental impact and is, he asserts, essentially indistinguishable from tap water. The average American drinks 18 half-liter bottles of bottled water a month, more than we drink of coffee, milk or beer. The resulting business is a booming $16 billion industry.

It’s an industry based on certain absurdities. Pepsi and Coke - producers of Aquafina and Dasani respectively - don’t even use spring water. Instead, they use tap water, put it through an energy-intensive osmosis filtering process, which may be unneccesary, as Fishman asserts that most water drinkers can’t distinguish between tap water and luxury bottled water if they’re presented in the same vessels at the same temperature.

Fishman doesn’t get quite as deep into the numbers as I’d like, though he offers some useful economic insights, pointing out that, “…half the price of a typical $1.29 bottle goes to the retailer. As much as a third goes to the distributor and transport. Another 12 to 15 cents is the cost of the water itself, the bottle and the cap. That leaves roughly a dime of profit.” That suggests that my cost estimates for shipping water from Fiji - 10 to 20 cents per liter - were quite low.

Then again, Pablo Päster, writing on Triple Pundit, has a calculation in great detail that suggests that producing and importing a bottle from Fiji is about $0.22, but that it entails an environmental impact of about 250 grams of greenhouse gases produced per bottle… He also points out that it requires approximately 5 liters of water to produce each one liter PET bottle… It’s possible that shipping water from Fiji is just endlessly fascinating to people who study the globalization of atoms.

Speaking of beverages, Ory points to a great Business Daily Africa article about the tremendous success of Safaricom. The mobile phone firm turned a profit of 17 billion Shillings last year, which is about $255 million. Who’s getting hurt by the rise of the mobile phone? Coke.

For instance, beverage manufacturers like Coca-Cola are finding that teenagers are more likely to use their pocket market buying pre-paid calling cards than buy a soft drink.

The same phenomenon is being replicated in categories like alcoholic beverages and even the newspapers where readers are getting news updates on the phone, faster than any traditional media could deliver.

This parallels a phenomenon I saw in Ghana when BusyInternet and other major cybercafes came online - a fall in beer sales. When people have limited disposeable income, people make tradeoffs in their spending. More mobile minutes or cybercafe time, fewer bottled drinks. Maybe Apple’s iPhone will help slow the sale of bottled water in the US. Somehow I doubt it.

One morning at the TED Global conference in Arusha, I watched a friend use Skype to call his family on the West Coast of the US, reaching his wife late at night her time. After they chatted for a while, he recorded a voicemail message for his kids and uploaded a set of photos for Flickr. The next morning, his wife played the message for the kids, showed them his photos and where he was, on Google Maps. The result is a sort of “soft telepresence” that probably beats the crap out of having Dad show up after two weeks with a handful of postcards and some toys…

I had my telepresence moment today when I saw a post on Rachel’s blog, including a photo of the raspberry canes we planted a few weeks ago. They’ve come into leaf, and at least a few of the canes are going to need trellises in a few more weeks. Poking into Rachel’s photostream, I can see that our blueberries are doing well, but don’t seem to be fruiting yet, and that the lawn isn’t quite as nightmarish as I’d feared. (The high grass is supposed to be high, actually - we mow the edges and leave the center as meadow…) I would never have thought of pointing a webcam at my backyard so I could monitor the grass growing from South Africa, but I found it curiously satisfying to get a glimpse of plants growing 7,800 miles away…

(Of course, the truly geeky conclusion to draw from this would be that I need a system of cameras, and a remote-controlled lawnmower that I can control via a web form. Or that I need to travel a little bit less, and stay home and mow more often…)

My Boston friends sometimes wonder aloud, “What do you people do for amusement out there in the Berkshires in the winter?” After all, it’s not like we’ve got cool bars to frequent, venues for live music or any museums to go to. And we’re so far from Boston that no one even blows up random items left on the sidewalk to keep us entertained. (It’s okay - you couldn’t find them in the snow anyway.)

The answer is pretty simple. We build stuff. Odd stuff. Dysfunctional hot tubs. Mongolian-inspired round houses (gers). Trebuchets. That sort of thing.

The most recent project is the result of a multiple-year conversation between me and one of my favorite conspirators, Daniel Beck. Daniel, his lovely wife and a mutual friend participated in Burning Man a few years back and came back with wonderful photos and great stories. I griped that an event that would require me to take two weeks off from work and rent an RV to bring whatever art we’d built probably wasn’t going to happen. Why didn’t someone start an East Coast alternative for those of us several days away from the playa?

And so we started developing a web joke - Freezing Man, the east coast alternative to Burning Man, held in late February in scenic Savoy Mountain State Forest (an especially cold and snowy corner of rural northwestern MA, which happens to be in Daniel’s back yard.) We’d put up photos of oddly dressed, semi-nude, glowstick-waving revellers standing waist deep in snow and wait to see who showed up for the gathering next February. (Yes, I realize there’s a Burning Man regular who hands out icecream as Freezing Man. And that BoingBoing has posted photos of the playa in the snow today. It’s a coincidence, I promise.)

But first, we needed a Man. The goal was a Burning-Man-like figure shivering in the cold, covered with icicles. We’re partway there, I think. Willy (as I’ve been thinking of him) is living in my back yard, attempting to grow a good coat of ice. Unfortunately, our first attempts to ice him (spraying him with cold water in near-zero weather) didn’t yield the icing we’d like - I’m now patiently waiting for the freezing rain we’re promised on Friday.

Daniel’s got a nice set of photos of the Man posted on his blog, currently dominating his front page. I’m particularly fond of this shot, where Daniel’s trying to anchor our statue firmly in the snow. We built Freezing Man by measuring Daniel and trying to build body parts roughly twice his size. Clearly we’re not very good at math.

Put a 15 foot tall wooden man in your backyard and you’ve got to expect some reaction from your neighbors. But our county houses some notable eccentrics - a neighbor on Green River Road in Williamstown has a 20-foot tall blue chair in his back yard for no discernable reason. Chesire, MA, has as its primary tourist attraction a giant concrete cheese press, a monument to the massive wheel of cheese the town presented to Thomas Jefferson in 1802.

A shopping plaza a few miles south used to feature a massive ship sinking into the parking lot - it was dismantled in 2002, removing one of the more picturesque attractions of that corner of Pittsfield, MA. (The piece was by Dustin Shuler, who’s done some truly amazing things with cars.)

In other words, I don’t really expect anyone to notice. That is, unless masses of glowstick-wielding revellers show up for our festival and start camping out in the ger. After all, we don’t have much tolerance for weirdness out here.

At Global Voices we’re excited about cross-cultural encounters, moments where people from different countries start talking to one another on common issues, like the dialog that took place between Chinese and African bloggers at the Hibiscus project meeting this past December in Delhi, or the cooperation between Indian and Pakistani bloggers to evade blog censorship.

But not all cultural encounters are quite so friendly. Millions of internet users around the world have learned about crime in Nigeria through cross-cultural encounters of the spammy kind. The interaction between “yahoo-yahoo boys” - young Nigerian men who make a living by sending 419 scam emails - and their victims in wealthier countries reveals some interesting perspectives on the situation. Some of the people involved with 419 (advance fee fraud) see their victims as deserving their fate due to their greed and their comparative economic advantage. Despite the damage 419 is doing to Nigeria’s international economic reputation, some Nigerian musicians and comedians are finding it fertile group for parody, including Osuofia and his wonderful song, “I Go Chop Your Dollar” (below).

There’s a movement online of “scammer baiters“, who attempt to “fight back” by leading on 419 scammers, attempting to get them to waste their time and engage in humiliating behaviors in the hopes of making money. They argue that this is justified, since the people they’re humiliating are criminals. One could also argue that these scammer baiters are basically tormenting desperate, poor people for their personal enjoyment.

So it’s with mixed emotion that I link to the funniest piece of scammer baiting I’ve seen so far. A scambaiter responded to a 419 email - a scam in which the author claimed to be dying of cancer, wanting to distribute his fortune. The scambaiter told the West African authors that he was a film producer and was offering scholarships for African filmmakers - to be eligible for a scholarship, they’d need to produce their version of a scene from television.

And hence, we now have: the Scam Version of the Monty Python “Dead Parrot” Sketch:

Ah, the communication the internet enables: Nigerian comedians can make fun of greedy Americans and western pranksters can make fun of West Africans. Not all cross-cultural interaction makes you want to sing “Kumbaya”. But I gotta say - these guys do a great Monty Python sketch, and I think they’ve got a future…